Reaching the Next Muslim Generation

By Mohamed Charfi

Published: March 12, 2002

TUNIS—
Since Sept. 11, the world has come to know more about the educational systems prevalent today in Muslim countries and their role in promoting hostility toward the West. The educational system of Osama bin Laden's native Saudi Arabia is being criticized in the West, particularly in the United States. The Indian government last December announced an effort to reform the Muslim religious schools known as madrasas, though this is perhaps a mixed blessing given that the same government is using the schools to promote Hinduism as part of its nationalist program. Across the border in Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf is pursuing reform of his country's educational system -- a project that will be watched by other Muslim nations. Education was a major subject of discussion in Mr. Musharraf's meeting with President Bush last month. This was itself something rather new.

Muslim countries entered into their rebirth and modernization in the 19th century. The prosecution of apostasy and the use of corporal punishment fell away; power passed, in general, from religious councils and tribunals to parliaments and secular courts. These changes were everywhere incomplete, hesitant, fragile -- notably because their doctrinal foundation was accepted only grudgingly by the state and the elites, and still less by the general public.

This was clear in the common approach to education. A great effort was made to teach foreign languages and scientific subjects. But in teaching religion, history, philosophy and civics, traditional approaches prevailed. Schools taught Muslim law, the sharia, with its classic content; they presented Muslim history in a theological fashion as though we were still living under the Umayyads or the Abbasids. Muslim law was taught as sacred, and the idealized caliphate, the first centuries of Islam's expansion after Muhammad's death, was offered as a kind of heaven on earth.

The consequences of such teachings on the minds of young people in most Muslim-majority countries have been disastrous. Students learn that, in order to be good believers, they should be living under a caliph, that divine law makes it necessary to stone the adulterer and forbid lending at interest . . . only to discover, out in the street, a society directed by a civil government with a modern penal code and an economy founded on a banking system.

Many Muslim children still learn at school the ancient ideology of a triumphant Muslim empire, an ideology that held all non-Muslims to be in error and saw its mission as bringing Islam's light to the world. And yet young people see their governments working to live in peace with non-Muslim powers. Such discordant teachings do not prepare children to live in a changing world.

Osama bin Laden, like the 15 Saudis who participated in the criminal operations of Sept. 11, seems to have been the pure product of his schooling. While Saudi Arabia is officially a moderate state allied with America, it has also been one of the main supporters of Islamic fundamentalism because of its financing of schools following the intransigent Wahhabi doctrine. Saudi-backed madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan have played significant roles in the strengthening of radical Islam in those countries.

Even in countries where religious teaching is less exalted, the general orientation toward fundamentalist instruction is not altogether different.

Tunisia is among the rare exceptions. Since 1989, a radical reform aimed at modernizing the entire educational system has been undertaken. In religious matters, programs and textbooks emphasize the thinking of scholars influenced by the best of our late-medieval thinkers, like Averroes and Avicenna. Such writers have developed new readings of the Koran and given Islam a content that allows for discussion of sexual equality, human rights and the development of democracy. Tunisian history is taught so that a young Tunisian will see his country's part in all its fullness, forgetting neither the strategy of Hannibal nor the philosophy of St. Augustine. The science curriculum at higher grades incorporates Darwinian evolution and big-bang theories about the origin of the universe, neither of which is taught in traditional Islam-based programs.

Our hope is that young Tunisians, through a more secular education, can be brought up to value individual liberty and openness to others. Combined with the emancipation of women and universal education -- all of which were part of President Habib Bourguiba's reforms, beginning in the late 50's -- this educational system is already helping to form a more modern society.

Unfortunately, the political structure has not kept pace. The police are omnipresent, the press and judiciary are controlled by the state and the country has become hostage to a system of personal power that comes from an earlier age. Fundamentalism is marginal in Tunisia, for the moment. But it will return if it becomes the last refuge of the discontented.

For now, we can hope that Mr. Musharraf will learn from Tunisia's recent mistakes -- like failing to make the political system more democratic -- as he can learn from its progress in creating schools that can help open the minds of a generation of students. Muslim countries today, after experiences with fundamentalism in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, need to begin a new phase of engagement with the world. Educational reform needs to be at the heart of this effort. Tunisia, though an imperfect example, offers important lessons in how it can be done.

Drawing (MK Mabry)

Mohamed Charfi, former president of the Tunisian Human Rights League and minister of education from 1989 to 1994, is author of ''Islam et Liberté.''